Minor Mac

I have been working on hard on sorting cards.  Need to do a post on that this weekend.  In the meantime, I have been filling some small holes in the collection.  Nothing too big, but I really liked one of the cards a little bit more than some of the others that I have picked up over the past few weeks.  Thought that the card should have its own post. 

Rewind to 1998.  Everyone was crazy about Mark McGwire. 

I lived in St. Louis.  I was really into Mark McGwire.  

I think there were card shops in St. Louis that were selling his 1985 Topps card for north of $200 during the summer of 1998.  Luckily, I had one, which allowed me to stick with finding other Big Mac cards.  Outside of the 1985 Topps rookie card, I mainly dabbled with his insert cards from the mid to late 1990s.  Heavy focus on the short time he was a Cardinal.  

My favorite Big Mac insert at the time was probably his Topps Gallery Heritage card.  

Topps has made oodles of reprints using the 1953 design since the late 1990s, but these cards were really cool at the time.  

I did not really do much to add to my collection of early McGwire cards.  I have a bunch of his cards from his time in Oakland, just really was not a priority back in the day.  They have kind of grown on me over the years, and I have made a small effort to pick up a few of those cards.  

Cards like his 1987 Topps.....

that I really did not care about one way, or the other back in 1998.  Now, one of my favorite early Big Mac cards.  

Recently, I have been checking into a few of his Minor League cards.  They were untouchable twenty years ago, especially when you considered the fact that you were getting something that was handed out at the gate of a Minor League stadium, and stamped with a Burger King logo for a pretty large dollar amount.  

I think I might have paid as much in shipping as I did for my most recent Mark McGwire card, and I can cross off owning a Minor League card of him.  

This is the team issued set from the Huntsville Stars.  There is another set that a local photographer produced.  That's a fairly inexpensive card too, but I liked the picture on this card a little better.  Kind of dig the team logo on the front too.  That thing has a good 1980s vibe to it, better than the Trash Pandas, or whatever the Huntsville team is now named.  

The back just has his vital information and the location of Burger King restaurants in Alabama.  I have been to Alabama, but never to a Burger King there.  I have been to Hunstville, and been to the stadium where the Stars played. 

That's a polecat in between us.  

There are other McGwire Minor League cards floating around out there, along with a college summer league card from somewhere in Alaska.  Not sure if will get any of the other McGwire cards, or just stop here.